So Yesterday - By Scott Westerfeld Page 0,5

who download the trailer a year before the movie comes out. (As they grow older, Early Adopters' closets fill up with dinosaur media: Betamax videos, laser discs, eight-track tapes.) They test and tweak the trend, softening the edges. And one vital difference from Trendsetters: Early Adopters saw their stuff in a magazine first, not on the street.

Further down we have the Consumers. The people who have to see a product on TV, placed in two movies, fifteen magazine ads, and on a giant rack in the mall before saying, "Hey, that's pretty cool."

At which point it's not.

Last are the Laggards. I kind of like them. Proud in their mullets and feathered-back hair, they resist all change, or at least all change since they got out of high school. And once every ten years they suffer the uncomfortable realization that their brown leather jackets with big lapels have become, briefly, cool.

But they bravely tuck in their Kiss T-shirts and soldier on.

The unspoken rule was that Mandy's meetings were for Trendsetters. Or at least people who had been Trendsetters before Mandy hired them. Once you get paid for being trendy, who knows what you are?

A cool hunter? Market researcher? Scam artist?

A big joke?

But Jen was no joke, whether she got fifty bucks for her opinion or not. She was an Innovator. And, as I should have expected, she had committed the original sin of having uttered an original thought.

"Did I get you in trouble?" she asked on the street.

"Nah," I said. (Nah is Hunter-speak for yes.)

"Come on. Mandy was about to spit her pacifier."

I smiled at the image. "Okay, sure. You got me in trouble."

Jen sighed, eyes dropping to the gum-spotted street. "That always happens."

"What always happens?"

"I say the wrong thing." Sadness had settled into Jen's voice, which I couldn't allow.

I took a rant-sized breath. "You mean, whenever you wind up hanging out with some new crowd and they're all agreeing with each other - about the new movie they all think is great, or the band they all love, or whatever is most recently super-cool - you find yourself uncontrollably saying that it's actually crap? 0ust because it is.) And suddenly they're all staring at you?"

Jen stopped right in front of the NBA store, openmouthed, framed by the merciless windowscape of team logos. I squinted in the glare.

"I guess so, yeah," she said. "I mean, exactly."

I smiled. I'd known a few Innovators in my day. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world to be. "And so your friends don't know what to do with you. So you shut up about it, right?"

"Well, that's the thing." She turned, and we kept walking downtown through the post-work crowd. "I never really got the shut-up-about-it part."

"Good for you."

"Which is how I got you in trouble, Hunter."

"So what? It's not like they can fix the ad with a re-edit. And it's too late to reshoot the whole thing. It would be worse if you'd said the white guy's tie was too wide. Then they'd actually have to do something."

"Oh, that makes me feel better."

"Jen, you shouldn't feel bad about this. You were the only one up there saying anything interesting. We've all done a hundred of those tastings. Maybe we've gone soft."

"Yeah, and maybe there was an MBWF thing going on in that conference room, too."

"There was?" I looked up at the skyscraper still hanging over us, and my memory flashed through all the faces, all the neighborhoods, cool I groups, and constituencies represented at the tasting. I slotted each participant into his or her place on the cool Venn diagram.

Jen was right: the whole focus group had been one big missing-black-woman formation.

"I hadn't even noticed."

"Really?"

"Really." I had to smile. "That makes it even better that you spoke up. Maybe it's not what Mandy wanted to hear, but it's what she needs to hear."

Jen was silent as we took the stairs down into the subway, swiped our cards to make the turnstiles turn.

On the platform we faced each other, close in the rush-hour crowd. Around us were guys with their jackets over one arm in the summer heat and women who'd changed into sneakers with their office attire. (I always wonder: who was the Innovator on that one? How many ankles and arches has she saved?) Jen was still looking down, and I watched her expression shifting, her furrowed brow and green eyes mobilized by another internal debate. I had the stray thought that she probably made silly faces at little kids on